Linguistic varieties of Old Turkic

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The more than 8000 manuscript fragments discovered in Western China and written down between the 9th and the 14th centuries, hundreds of inscriptions in the so-called runiform script discovered in Mongolia, South Siberia and Kirgizstan, the oldest of which date to the late 7th century, and a few Muslim Turkic texts from 11th and 12th century may perhaps be considered to belong to a single language in spite of the long period and the huge area covered. The project plans to survey this corpus in order to discover the phonic, morphological and lexical features which can lead to the assignment of the texts to dialects. Only a small minority of the texts can be reliably dated, making it debatable whether some features are dialectological or diachronic; most of the sources are religious texts brought together in monasteries, blurring provenance; these sometimes seem to have been copied from one dialect into another.